10 Episodes That Should Have Changed Star Trek Forever - But Didn't

3. "The Pegasus" (TNG)

In "The Pegasus," we discover that a few years before Star Trek: The Next Generation, William Riker was involved in a secret (and illegal, since it violates a treaty with the Romulan Star Empire) experiment in phased cloaking technology aboard the U.S.S. Pegasus. Over the course of the episode, the cloaking device - which not only renders ships invisible, but allows them to pass through solid objects, in a frankly ridiculous two finger salute to science - is recovered and successfully used by the Enterprise-D. It stands to reason that the Federation abandoned the technology after this incident to appease the Romulans, but it would have certainly been useful during the Dominion War later on. It's not hard to imagine the Romulans revising the terms of the treaty during the war if the addition of an interphasic cloaking technology to key vessels could have brought it to an early end.